Season 4 Episode 2 :: Manholes of Venus

Nerdy Show comin’ at ya! We’re tearin’ down that space highway, haulin’ our 10 megaton truth bombs outside the galaxy and into your MINDZONE. We ain’t stoppin’ for nothin’, ‘cept to make a pit stop at the best little whorehouse in the Kuiper belt. But after that, you can kiss your cranial keister goodbye! Yeeee-haw!

In this episode we hitch a ride with forgotten Marvel hero, Ulysses Solomon Archer, who Brian recently resurrected for his Infinity Gauntlet miniseries and then rake Brian’s brain over the coals trying to get him to divulge info on the latest volume of Atomic Robo. Our Robo tangent extends beyond the comics segment and into sci-tech where we proceed to slander and defame Thomas Edison, enemy of Tesla and all early 20th century geniuses.

Things heat up and get political in Nerd Music. We interviewed white comedy rapper, MC Wreckshin on how a simple tweet from him led well-known hip hop artist, Sage Francis to declare, like Lars before him, that Nerdcore is racist. We also talk to UK chiptunes duo, Superpowerless and Jaylyn of Tetrastarduring a recent stopover in the US. This was hot on the heels of the UK court ruling that caused the ROM hardware used to make chiptunes to become illegal.

It’s nuts in the gaming world right now as the pre-holiday releases have kicked into full gear. We can’t keep up with it the gaming deluge so we picked some particularly nerdy items: Fallout: New Vegasand Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2. TFU2 gets inevitably leads into some additional pent-up Star Wars rage from the last time we touched the subject. Along for the ride is our returning Star Wars Expanded Universe expert, Matt Spill. Also touched on are Fable 3 and the retro-styled web game,VVVVVV. Look for more pre-holiday gaming madness in a Minisode soon!

This delicious helping of nerd culture and geekery is sandwiched by two nerdy things making waves in mainstream pop culture. Learn our feelings on the television adaptation of Walking Dead and get first impressions of Tron: Legacy thanks to a 23 minute 3D preview. Also a special appearance by Jamela, Minecraft, and a kerjillion other crazy things.

iTunes can’t handle our 4-part awesomeness in one dose. Subscribers get the full-length “classic-style” podcast. We recommend the bite-sized segments, which you can download below. Each have their own tracklists and links sections – Handy dandy!

Yeah, I posted the full article but made a note above about just posting one part. We’re still good, I’m just behind schedule. We might pace releases so all the mini parts show up on iTunes for future releases, but we’re still working that out.

Marsh

Electrocution of the elephant reminded me of another piece of old film footage of “science” don’t to an animal. All I’ll just say it involves a dog, the first life support system, and nightmares that you can’t unsee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL9hoIwvgK8 specifically @ 5:40

OmniG

oh god Ranma 1/2, that show makes my brain hurt and my roommate loves it, but I am totally down for reviving US-1

OmniG

Oh, and to the Sega Genisis list I feel I must add “Crusader of Centy”, the “Shining Force” series (1&2), and the “Shinobi” series especially 3. Those games were fun as hell, tho they never caused me to hide away my NES.

I know right? How’s THAT for a change… a quiet Hex. Guess we over-compensated. Heh.

Ghouleh

What a massive episode. I mean, I just put it on while playing Mass Effect. And I really gotta stop listening to podcasts while playing games. Shooting geth at the sound of “Show Me How To Blow Dudes” might’ve killed it for me a bit.

Anyway, you covered a LOT of ground in this episode. While I’m not a fan of comic books, the whole “Walking Dead” stuff was pretty good, if not outright awesome.

I had heard of Thomas Edison’s crazy exploits in my country’s equivalent of Nerdy Show before, but actually hearing the opinions of his compatriots was an unique insight into the subject. Also Brian should really go ahead and put him as a villain in Atomic Robo.

Project Orion and super-hero space suits? Oh my. Although massive apocalyptic machines with kilometers of tubes and nuclear bomb-pooping spacecraft certainly hold an appeal, I gotta say I’d go with the minimalist suits, even if it looks like they’re running a marathon or something.

And finally, videogames! All that talk about Earthbound and Metroid and Castlevania and Mass Effect(made me play it, did you?) and finally there’s something I can sink my teeth into. Force Unleashed 2 and Fallout; New Vegas.

TFU2. Agh. How can I say this? I liked the first one. A lot. Force Unleashed 2 has some beautifully-rendered environments, surprisingly good voice acting I didn’t see since Legacy of Kain, and Force Fury which temporarily elevated your power over the 9000 mark. But that aside..? I was really, really disappointed. The whole “Juno” thing, I completely agree that it was forced upon Starkiller just so he had a romantic interest, and since pretty much all of the game revolves around that, the appeal decays rather quickly. It is so horribly short. And the endings… I mean, what the hell? I liked in Force Unleashed 1 how you could go canon and die, or break the lore and go Ultimate Sith Edition (awesome DLC, by the way), but this… This is just too much.
Yes, you can cut off Stormtroopers’ heads and limbs off, but you beat the crap out of Darth Vader about a million times harder, and not a scratch on his armor, while in 1, by the end he was pretty much all exposed.
Overall, these were just not the droids I was looking for.

Now Fallout. Damn. I’ve been always a huge fan of the series since 1, and so let me begin by saluting our dear Brian for that Nuka Break fanfilm thingy. I hope it follows through. I will most certainly watch it.
The game itself is packed with bugs, but what the hell, it does not tarnish the shine of the franchise. It was actually fun seeing scorpions partially sunk into the ground, frantically trying to run but ultimately being stuck.
Anyway. I haven’t finished the game yet, and it doesn’t have the eye candy effect of playing Fallout 3 for the first time after a pretty much hegemony of 2D, but still. And I agree that Hardcore mode only adds to the flavor. I mean, a central part of Fallout was always the water, and yet our beloved Vault Dweller/Chosen One/101/Courier doesn’t need it him/herself? I’ll admit, I’m only playing Harcore once, though. It can be pretty hard to manage overload, hunger, thirst, sleep deprivation AND radiation. Oh. And health. At the same time.

Overall it was a great episode, if a little overwhelming. Do you plan on doing 3-hour extravaganzas like this often?

Matt.C

Heya. 🙂

I don’t want to sound like a broken record (and I already downloaded the full episode [Yes, I like the “huge” format better than the bite-sized segments, as I often listen to it while driving the Autobahn.].)…

But iTunes never updated. I still only got the 60min version “sneak peek” through them and had to manually download the full episode from here.

It’s not a great hassle, but I manage my podcasts via iTunes, so it’s an extra step to make it all “work” for me.

And it also weirds me out why iTunes can’t seem to get with the program and release the podcast you want it to be released as…

Ghouleh

@Matt.C

I had the same problem. iTunes just wouldn’t give me the full version. I had to download it straight from the site.
Fortunately, I think it won’t be a problem. Although I also manage my podcasts via iTunes, it’s unlikely that they’ll make a habit of recording XBOX HUEG episodes like this.

No worries lads. We’ve got a plan. While I’ve got no clue why the episode hasn’t updated in iTunes yet to display the classic-style episode, next time things will be done different. When we realized the hiccup in our plans at the beginning of last month, we changed some things and now this different kind of hiccup has set us back on course. Hopefully iTunes organizing won’t continue to be a problem, but you can always add the items to the podcasts folder in your iTunes backend and it’ll sort itself out (I think).

Is it the plan for all Season 4 episodes to be this huge? Nope! We’re trying out different styles of recording and with this one we just let our conversations fly. That’s why we have such an emphasis on the segments. 3 1/2 hours is scary!

Josh Hammer

So on the topic of the long episodes, it changed for me after I deleted the shorter one, then re-downloaded from iTunes. I had a similar problem with Metroid Babies. Just in case nobody else has a solution.

AntiLuke

I explained that insanely difficult part of VVVVVV to my roommate and he said something that kind of fits the game pretty well. “Most of the time when you describe a difficult part in a game it sounds less difficult until you actually play for yourself. What you just described to me sounds impossible.”